Suchergebnisse

Goals and the performance feedback on those goals are fundamental to organizational learning and adaptation. However, most research has focused on single overall, high-level organizational goals while ignoring important operational goals farther down in the goal hierarchy. This paper explores the important issue of interdependent feedback on multiple operational goals with shared task environments. We conjecture about the impact of shared technological task environments on feedback across goals. We then empirically examine these conjectures using panel vector autoregression (PVAR) analysis of performance feedback from three strategically important operational goals with shared technological task environments in the automobile industry. We find that interdependent feedback can lead to severe and misleading confusion regarding learning from feedback on such goals with shared task environments. Then, we discuss the implications of our findings. These include the following: the absolute intractability of the problem of meeting multiple goals with interdependent task environments as the number of goals increases; limits on the modularity of organization structure; and severe challenges in ex post credit assignment and ex ante planning when goals share technological task environments. Finally, we discuss the application of PVAR to interdependent feedback problems in organizations.The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1207 .

Academics, politicians, and journalists are often highly critical of U.S. firms for holding too much cash. Cash holdings are stockpiled free-cash flow and incur substantial opportunity costs from the perspectives of economics. However, behavioral theory highlights the benefits of cash holdings as fungible slack resources facilitating adaptive advantages. We use the countervailing forces embodied in these two theories to hypothesize and test a quadratic functional relationship of returns to cash measured by Tobin's q. We also build and test a related novel hypothesis of scale-dependent returns to cash based on the competitive strategy concept of strategic deterrence. Tests for both of these hypotheses are positive and show that returns to cash continue to increase far beyond transactional needs.

This study examines how competitive market conditions shape the responsiveness with which businesses release generational product innovations (GPIs) following the introduction of GPIs by either competitors or complementary firms. GPIs are substantial technical advances in the performance of products within technology regimes. Prior studies of innovation timing in the organizational strategy literature emphasize internally driven strategies of GPI. Although internally driven strategies may predominate when businesses face diffuse competition for their product lines, the literature largely overlooks the point that businesses need to be increasingly responsive to external events as market concentration increases. This study, which examines businesses competing in the U.S. packaged software industry in the 1990s, shows that increasing industry concentration raises the stakes surrounding market positions and leads to greater interdependence of innovation strategies in an industry—including interactions both with competitors and with other players in a larger system of complementary products. As concentration increases, therefore, organizations are less driven by historical patterns of innovation and become increasingly responsive to innovations by both types of external actors.